Street Fight Daily: 03.05.12

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Yelp is worth $1.5 billion… Now what? (GigaOm)
What’s Yelp to do with its new riches? Well, if it’s anything like LinkedIn or Zynga, it will start sniffing around for acquisitions to augment its existing platform, to integrate new features and to add talented engineers. Here’s a list of some interesting possible acquisition targets for the company.

How Newspapers Are Faring Trying to Build Digital Revenue (Pew Research)
A new study, based on analysis of private financial data from 38 newspapers and in-depth interviews with senior executives from 13 companies, found that the papers studied are losing seven dollars in print advertising for every one dollar they are gaining in new digital revenue — a ratio that shows the pace at which newspapers are shrinking.

Square’s Register and the Return of the Mom-and-Pop Shop (GigaOm)
Square is giving small vendors the tools to make intelligent decisions with the same sort of inventory management, sales data and analytics their larger competitors have. And it’s got the potential to make an even greater impact than the initial payment processing piece had made.

Foursquare’s Inflection Point: People Using The App, But Not Checking In (TechCrunch)
When you start, you are so focused on engagement,” said the company’s CEO Dennis Crowley. “Then you hit this point when you are big enough and say there is something awesome going on anyway. At some point you look and say, oh wow, the consumption model is actually taking off.” That seems to fit well with Crowley’s vision of how Foursquare is going to grow in the near future.

AOL Patch Will Fire 200 People This Week, Employee Claims (Business Insider)
A Patch employee emailed Business Insider last week to say that he (or she?) just heard from their manager that the company will be firing over 200 under-performing workers in ad sales next week. This employee said that management had put these workers on a “performance improvement plan” and that these employees had failed that plan.

Washington Post Digital Revenue Officer Ken Babby Out (Poynter)
Ken Babby, the company’s chief revenue officer, general manager for digital “has decided to leave The Post in order to pursue other digital ventures,” announced Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth. Babby started at the Post 12 years ago as an intern in IT.